Have a gander at this old posting at Pedantry to discover just how often the US nearly went to war with Canada during the 19th century.
Speaking of Canada, the Vancouver Sun has more on the recent police raid on the offices of two aides to BC provincial cabinet ministers. It was all about drugs. No-one is saying why, exactly, these two aides were targeted, just that some unspecified information came up in the course of other investigations into drugs and organised crime. The Sun claims that at least one was directly linked to the drug probe,
...which the RCMP says was launched in the spring of 2002 into the involvement of organized crime in the sale of B.C.-grown marijuana in the U.S. in exchange for cocaine, which was then sold in Canada.
There is apparently some kind of police incompetence or corruption angle too:
Victoria Police Chief Paul Battershill has confirmed the drug investigation is connected to the suspension with pay on Dec. 15 of Victoria police Constable Ravinder Dosanjh.Sources have told The Sun the drug probe is targeting a suspected influential Victoria trafficker related to Dosanjh. The alleged trafficker is also a relative of a Vancouver resident who has worked on provincial and federal Liberal campaigns.
The RCMP issued this statement, which stresses the organised crime aspect.
The provincial government insists the aide raid has nothing to do with the business of governance and doesn't reflect at all on the BC Liberal Party (which is, you'll recall, not actually liberal at all, and totally unrelated to the federal Liberal Party). Premier Gordon Campbell, convicted drunk driver, had very little of any substance to say, when The Sun interviewed him by phone; he's still on vacation in Hawaii, where he was arrested for drunk driving a year ago. Drunkenly. (BC premiers have a history of fucking up like that.) However, some people are trying to link this to the recent deal to privatise BC Rail, which the BC Liberals had explicitly promised not to do, and which seems like a pretty poor deal for the province.
I don't really have a particular reason for mentioning this at all. Except that it paints British Columbian politics as being a bit scummy, and portrays the province as being held in a testicle-clamp of fear by drugs syndicates.
The logical conclusion seems to me to be that, if marijuana possession, growth, and distribution were legalised and regulated, not only would these crime rings be mostly neutralised, but family farms and small businesses could boom, and $6 billion (Canadian) or more a year could be added to the province's (legal) economy, more than is brought in by logging or, indeed, any other industry in the province; just imagine the tax revenues...
Which would you rather have in a province: the Canadian equivalent of the Corleones, or a bunch of happy, harmless stoners who remember not to operate heavy machinery and think about robots a lot?
And a Happy New Year.
Posted by aloysius at December 31, 2003 04:50 PM | TrackBack |